William Shakespeare who was baptised on 26 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616 was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaboration, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. Traditionally, the 37 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy; they have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed all around the world.
Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labeled some of these plays "problem plays" which elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.
The Elizabethan era was a time associated with Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603) and is often considered to be the golden age in English history. It was the height of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of English poetry, music and literature. This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre flourished, and William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of theatre. It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repulsed. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.
The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century. The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.
England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsula. France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries long conflict between France and England was largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.
One similarity between the Elizabethan Era and today is that we are now living in an Elizabethan Era since Queen Elizabeth II is reigning.
The differences between the two times are surely quite obvious - we have electricity, they didn't, we have excellent medical care, they didn't, we have plumbing, they didn't, we have automobiles, trains, aircraft, they didn't, citizens both male and female can vote, it wasn't like that in the 16th century Just think things through and you'll come up with a lot of differences. Queen Elizabeth I never married, Queen Elizabeth did and has four children.
I do not think that Shakespeare's work can be applied to to the modern day context. Firstly, the actors in Shakespeare's plays have to speak in Old English and that would be very hard to understand by people today as we all speak modern English. Secondly, even if the script is changed to suit today's modern English, it will still be in poetry style and I am sure that in this modern society that we live in now, where people nowadays watch movies and films, I am sure that not many people will want to watch Shakespeare's plays or even be able to understand and appreciate the underlying meaning of the plays in which Shakespeare wants to tell his audience.
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